How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone: A Memoir

Both of them helped me consider that the response to something broken isn’t a big resolution, it’s in the sweeping, baking, planting, building, and caring for the world we need to live in every day.

so I stop and wonder how to be inside an afternoon with no demands, no work, no one else to please.

Sarah Schulman in Conflict Is Not Abuse. “If conflicted people were expected and encouraged to produce complex understandings of their relationships, then people could be expected to negotiate, instead of having to justify their pain through inflated charges of victimization. And it is in the best interest of us all to try to consciously move to th

It’s just a job. It’s just sitting, waiting, zoning out, and being a piece of a machine, and sometimes I’m too tired and it’s too big and I’m just one piston.

I know I can only be powerful if people are listening, and I must be powerful if I want to survive.

To avoid abusive power means deciding that the power of these men isn’t something we want,[4] isn’t something that can make our lives better, or more just, or more sustainable. And when I work for them, I am participating, exploiting those further down the ladder.

In Michelle Cliff’s “Notes on Speechlessness” she writes, “Speechlessness involves self-denial…to choose to express/to choose to express anger.”[1] I add in the margin: “and for me, to choose to express joy/to choose to feel/to choose to feel pleasure,” because both disappeared when language disappeared. I neglected life-sustaining joy because surv

And the ability to disassociate is also what made me successful: Without my own emotion getting in the way, the audience could find room for their own response.

When you are speechless, the last place a story lives is in the body. And the body keeps bringing me back here.

When you spend time calibrating for the mood and comfort of those around you, it’s like a radio that’s always on. When it turns off, emptiness.